Fiona Sze-Lorrain | |
|---|---|
 Fiona Sze-Lorrain in 2017 | |
| Born | 1980 (age 43–44) Singapore |
| Occupation | Writer, poet, translator, editor, harpist |
| Language | English, French, Chinese |
| Nationality | French |
| Education | Columbia University (B.A.) New York University (M.A.) Paris-Sorbonne University (Ph.D., French) École Normale de Musique de Paris |
| Spouse | Philippe Lorrain |
Fiona Sze-Lorrain (born 1980) is a French writer, musician, poet, literary translator, and editor.
Born in Singapore, Sze-Lorrain grew up trilingual and has lived mostly in Paris and New York City. She spent her childhood in a hybrid of cultures, and her formative years in the United States and France. [1] She began studying classical piano and guzheng at a young age. A graduate of Columbia University, she obtained her master's degree from New York University and attended the École Normale de Musique de Paris before earning a PhD in French from the Paris-Sorbonne University.
Sze-Lorrain's work involves fiction, poetry, translation, music, theater, and the visual arts. She writes mainly in English, and translates from Chinese and French. She also works with Spanish, Italian, and Japanese. She has written for venues related to fashion journalism, music and art criticism, and dramaturgy. [2]
In 2007, Sze-Lorrain worked with Gao Xingjian on a book of photography, essays, and poetry based on his film Silhouette/Shadow. [3]
Through Mark Strand, whose works she would later translate into French, [4] she found her poetic vocation, crediting him for having introduced her to poetry. [5] Sze-Lorrain's debut poetry collection, Water the Moon, appeared in 2010, followed by My Funeral Gondola in 2013. [6] Her third collection, The Ruined Elegance, was published by Princeton University Press in the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets in 2016 and was named one of Library Journal's Best Books in Poetry for 2015. [7] It was also a finalist for the 2016 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. [8]
Published during the COVID-19 pandemic, her fourth collection Rain in Plural (Princeton University Press, 2020) contains many "poems that resonate with a political undertone, and they often suggest in the midst of great threats we persist and continue our important work, aware we alone are not the only or even the most vulnerable. The poems care about the larger world and our current crises." [9]
In response to the pandemic in Paris, Sze-Lorrain wrote a setting of new poems The Year of the Rat, set to music by Peter Child for unaccompanied voices, and virtually premiered in February 2021 by the solo artists of the Cantata Singers and Ensemble in Boston. [10] [11]
In 2023, Scribner published Sze-Lorrain's novel in stories Dear Chrysanthemums. Praised in The New York Times Book Review as "nimble, evocative," it is set in Shanghai, Beijing, Singapore, Paris, and New York, following a cast of Asian women from 1946 to 2016. [12] It is longlisted for the 2024 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. [13]
Sze-Lorrain practices calligraphy and ink. Her poems and translations, handwritten in ink, were exhibited alongside ink drawings by Fritz Horstman from the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in the art show, A Blue Dark, at The Institute Library (New Haven) in 2019. [14] [15]
The Rumpus said of her writing that it "serves as a vital midwife for the greater global understanding that will one day be born from today’s contracting and relaxing tensions between differing religions, cultures, and languages." [16]
Prairie Schooner describes her work as an "arc" that "navigates the sense of otherness" with poems that "burst at the seams with the customs, gastronomy, ancestry, literature, and art of the two cultures." [17]
Publishers Weekly calls her novel in stories "graceful" and "this author is one to watch" as she "effortlessly evokes the spirit of each setting" and "imbues her characters with haunting melancholy." [18]
Mekong Review wrote that her fiction "resonates with a rich and efficient prosody. The narrative structure is creative, with each story placing an increasingly complete puzzle on top of the last." [19]
Sze-Lorrain is a translator of contemporary American, French, and Chinese poetry. [20] Her work was shortlisted for the 2020 Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry [21] and the 2016 Best Translated Book Award, [22] and longlisted for the 2014 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. [23] She serves on the committee of the Translators Association of the Society of Authors in the UK. [24]
She is a co-founder of Cerise Press (2009–13), [25] [26] a corresponding editor of Mānoa (2012–14), and an editor at Vif Éditions.
The recipient of fellowships from Yaddo, Ledig House, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, she is the inaugural writer-in-residence at MALBA in Buenos Aires. [27] She has also been a visiting poet at various colleges and universities in United States and Europe. She is a 2019-20 Abigail R. Cohen Fellow at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination. [28]
As a classical zheng harpist, Sze-Lorrain has performed worldwide. [29] She has served as a festival and competition judge.
Sze-Lorrain lives in Paris with her husband Philippe Lorrain, former art director, independent publisher. [30]
Film
Sir Derek Alton Walcott OM was a Saint Lucian poet and playwright. He received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature. His works include the Homeric epic poem Omeros (1990), which many critics view "as Walcott's major achievement." In addition to winning the Nobel Prize, Walcott received many literary awards over the course of his career, including an Obie Award in 1971 for his play Dream on Monkey Mountain, a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award, a Royal Society of Literature Award, the Queen's Medal for Poetry, the inaugural OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the 2010 T. S. Eliot Prize for his book of poetry White Egrets and the Griffin Trust For Excellence in Poetry Lifetime Recognition Award in 2015.
Gao Xingjian is a Chinese émigré and later French naturalized novelist, playwright, critic, painter, photographer, film director, and translator who in 2000 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for an oeuvre of universal validity, bitter insights and linguistic ingenuity." He is also a noted translator, screenwriter, stage director, and a celebrated painter.
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Arthur Sze is an American poet, translator, and professor. Since 1972, he has published ten collections of poetry. Sze's ninth collection Compass Rose (2014) was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Sze's tenth collection Sight Lines (2019) won the 2019 National Book Award for Poetry.
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Patrick McGuinness FRSL FLSW is a British academic, critic, novelist, and poet. He is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Oxford, where he is Fellow and Tutor at St Anne's College.
Maureen Hynes is a Canadian poet and author. Her debut collection of poetry, Rough Skin, won the League of Canadian Poets' Gerald Lampert Award for best first book of poetry by a Canadian in 1996.
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Yu Xiuhua is a Chinese poet. She lives in the small village of Hengdian, Shipai, Zhongxiang, Hubei, China, and has cerebral palsy resulting in speech and mobility difficulties. Despite this, she still writes poetry, and as of January 2015 Xiuhua had written over two thousand poems. In 2014, her poem I Crossed Half of China to Sleep with You (穿过大半个中国去睡你) was reposted frequently in WeChat, leading to a significant increase in her notoriety. In the same year, the poem magazine, a national magazine of China, published her poetry, which made her work even more famous. Still Tomorrow a documentary about her rise to fame and relationship with her family as well as her divorce from her husband, was released in 2016, and has been showcased in different film festivals. Moonlight Rests on My Left Palm, a collection of poems and essays in writer, poet, and translator Fiona Sze-Lorrain's translation, is out from Astra House in 2021.
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I can't say I have a poetic lineage, since I don't seem to have a home culture, even though I write poetry only in English. I often credit the late Mark Strand for introducing me to poetry, when I was at a crossroad in life.
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